I'm trying to put *.bib in a centralized directory under OS X. How do you do that?

From reading a few posts on this topic, it appears that $LOCALTEXMF is the place to put it. However, in Mac, this is not defined. Putting glossaries in /Users/my-mac/Library/texmf/tex works, so I thought putting *.bib there would work too, but it doesn't. It has to be in the directory from which I typeset the *.tex file containing the bib statements.

I'm not a MAC user, but then again, MACTeX is based on TeXlive, or so I've read at some post or other...TL doesn't use $LOCALTEXMF anymore, AFAIK. Nowadays, it's $TEXMFLOCAL.However, $TEXMFLOCAL isn't necessarily an environment variable (unless you set it yourself); use something like

a colon (:) splits one path from another, a leading !! on a sub path indicates, that you have to run `mktexlsr' or `texhash' after dropping something into it---for the (newly dropped) addition to be found.In my case, the check on $TEXMFLOCAL produces /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local,and the corresponding entry in the search path for .bib files in my case is!!/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/bibtex/bib//,which (at least) should tell you, that just dropping some .bib file into $TEXMFLOCAL won't do; if you put this .bib file into $TEXMFLOCAL/bibtex/bib instead, it might just work (if you did the aforementioned texhash...)

so it seems also putting into a user library such as /Users/my-mac/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib/ would work. Maybe that's not touched by an update like a central place. if you are the only LaTeX user on your Macbook, a user directory is a good place.